Verona Hayward
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<title source="Name"> <default>Verona Hayward</default> </title> <image source="Image"> </image> <title source="title"> </title> <label>Alias</label> <label>Age</label> <label>Gender</label> <label>Status</label> <label>Type</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Affiliation</label> <label>Family</label> <label>Occupation</label> <label>First Appearance</label>
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Verona is one of the protagonists of Pale.
Personality
Verona is a young girl dealing with the usual frustrations of being a teenager. She is somewhat more skeptical and imaginative than her two friends.<ref>“Why were my eyes last to open?” Verona asked “That doesn’t seem right.”
“It’s a good thing, Verona. Those things that let you hold onto what came before, like skepticism, imagination? They’re going to be things that make you an excellent practitioner, should you follow through here today.” - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1</ref>
She cares more about having clothes that she likes deeply and are "hers" than having a lot of clothes, or having clothes in good condition.<ref name=":0">Her mom had been so frustrated when she hadn’t wanted to buy a lot of
clothes. It was Verona’s preference to have things that were very
precisely hers, instead of a lot of things that kind of worked. To those ends, she had two pairs of jeans she wore, this low cut pair of skinny black jeans, and acid-washed jeans with holes at the knees. She had three sweaters, all with broad horizontal stripes, two of which were
black and white, and then tops she tended to wear under the sweaters.
The sweater she was wearing now had a hole in the elbow. The other elbow had had the same problem, but she’d patched it with black moleskin. There were some loose threads of wool near the collar, too. - excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1 </ref>
She dislikes the repetitive, never-ending nature of cleaning.<ref>She’d decided. She really, really hated cleaning. She hated how insurmountable it was, she hated how cleaning off a surface often meant getting other things dirty, she hated every step in the process, and now
that she was as close to done as she could get, she felt next to no
satisfaction. It would just get dirty again, and she hated that. Hated
that she was cleaning up a mess that would get made again and again for the next… however many years. Fifty. Seventy. Crumbs and dust and
gross food on gross plates, over and over again.
She stood in the doorway of the living room, surveying it all, and felt her dissatisfaction grow until she had to turn away.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1 </ref>
Relationships
Lucy
Friends since kindergarten. Verona considers Lucy her best friend. Verona is able to make stark emotional confessions to Lucy, while holding everyone else (including her parents) at arm's length.
Avery
Recent friends. <ref>'“I made them an offer, five weeks ago. The two girls were friends already. I pointed them to the third because three makes a good number."' - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1</ref>
Verona's Dad
Verona lives in Kennet with her divorced father, who has full custody of Verona. Their relationship is toxic and awkward, with Verona's dad displaying (at least) signs of being a narcissistic parent.
Verona's Mom
Verona's mom lives "between two and a half and three hours" away<ref>[1] from Leaving a Mark 4.2</ref> and works for the Canadian government. She visits or communicates with Verona rarely. Verona would probably prefer to live with her mother, but her mother refuses to relocate closer to Kennet.
Appearance
She cuts her own hair, maintaining it in a french bob.<ref>After a quick glance in the mirror, she grabbed her scissors and tidied her bangs. She picked up a hand mirror to fix a few stray hairs at the back.
[...]
“Scissors?” he asked.
Oh, she was still holding them. She touched them to her hair. As part of the back to school shopping, her mom had taken her to a stylist to get a french bob and she’d been trimming it herself to keep it in approximately the same style ever since.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1 </ref>
Her few outfits include too-tight black jeans, acid-washed jeans with holes at the knees, and several sweaters with horizontal stripes on them.<ref name=":0" />
In full garb as a practitioner, Verona wears a cat mask that was created for her by Lucy, as well as a witch's hat and cloak. When the participants of the hungry choir ritual looked at her in this outfit, she looked like an anthropomorphic cat woman.<ref>Three figures were approaching. They could almost be mistaken for the children that were scattered everywhere, but they were too animated, and too curious about their surroundings, looking around and looking up at the moon, where the children of this place were focused wholly on the ritual’s participants. They couldn’t be Witnesses, because they had faces…
Animal faces, two of them wearing wide-brimmed hats, the other with a cord tying her hat to her neck.
The cat-faced girl had shadow clinging close to her cloak, to the point it was hard to make her out in the dark, not helped by the dark fur of her face. Her eyes flashed violet as she looked over everyone and everything. Her cloak was pulled over her hat, brim and point swept back, and made the hood more pointy behind her head.
-Lost for Words 1.z </ref>
Abilities and Art
In addition to the shared abilities and gear of the Kennet Trio, Verona has her own distinctive Second Sight. This allows her to see in the dark, and she percieves the world as filled with layers of plastic behind which strange flayed creatures are sometimes hiding. She's discovered that she can ask the largest of these beings (which she suspects are Spirits) simple questions.
Tools
Verona has taken to using the trio's training in diagrams and Runes to make "spell cards" which can be completed with a small mark, functioning a little like different types of grenade (incendiaries, flashes, bangs) in combat.
She generally keeps the pen which moves letters around which Miss gave the trio.
History
Arc 1: Lost for Words
Verona, alongside Avery and Lucy, was brought into the world of the practice, in order to investigate the mysterious death of the Carmine Beast. Her Personal Item was scissors.
Arc 2: Stolen Away
Verona continued on with the investigation of the Others of Kennet, eventually coming to the cave of Maricica and Guilherme. During the interview, she is turned into a weasel by Maricica as one of Maricica's gifts in glamour, a form which she stays in for most of the rest of the interview. She is turned back when Lucy throws her into the ground. <ref>-Stolen Away 2.3</ref>
Verona later on invites Avery over to her house to get ready for conducting interviews with the rest of the Kennet Others. After they have an encounter with Verona's Dad, the group leave to meet Alpeana. She takes them on her nightly trips, and Verona agrees to letting Alpeana give her dad a nightmare. After the nightmare begins though, Verona calls it off, stating she 'still loves him'. <ref>-Stolen Away 2.5</ref><ref>“Why?” Verona asked, not taking her eyes off her dad. “Are you? He tries hard, and he does the basics of what a dad’s supposed to do, according to those guys from the government. Feeds me, shelters me, makes sure I go to school. Just… he’s broken and he won’t put himself back together. I don’t think he’s where he’s supposed to be.”
“Then-” Lucy started
.
Verona wasn’t done. “But I don’t want him to hurt. I don’t want to see him hurt. He makes me more miserable than anyone and I feel exhausted and even a bit of dread when he comes in the door, but I love him. I want to not live in his house, at least after I’m eighteen, and I’m not even sure I’ll come back to visit him when I’m gone, but… I love him.”
- Stolen Away 2.5
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References
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